Book Review: Conversion - Bourque's Books

“I was impressed. She had already mastered the art of not saying much of anything at all.”
― Katherine Howe, Conversion

Book Title: Conversion

Author: Katherine Howe

Publication Date: 2014

Genres: Young Adult Fiction, Mystery, Paranormal

Goodreads Rating: 3.42 Stars

My Rating: 3.0 Stars

It’s senior year at St. Joan’s Academy, and school is a pressure cooker. College applications, the battle for valedictorian, deciphering boys’ texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends are expected to keep it together. Until they can’t.

First it’s the school’s queen bee, Clara Rutherford, who suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class. Her mystery illness quickly spreads to her closest clique of friends, then more students and symptoms follow: seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joan’s buzzes with rumor; rumor blossoms into full-blown panic.

Soon the media descends on Danvers, Massachusetts, as everyone scrambles to find something, or someone, to blame. Pollution? Stress? Or are the girls faking? Only Colleen—who’s been reading The Crucible for extra credit—comes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly bizarre epidemic three centuries ago . . .

Inspired by true events—from seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high school—Conversion casts a spell. With her signature wit and passion, New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe delivers an exciting and suspenseful novel, a chilling mystery that raises the question, what’s really happening to the girls at St. Joan’s?

1. All I needed was half the book. The novel jumped between present day (ok, 2012) and 1706 during the Salem witch trials. Except.. it wasn’t. It was years after the Salem witch trials in which Ann Putnam is confessing to lying about the whole ordeal. That’s cool and all, but I know that story. We all know that story. The present day portions of the book with Colleen was far, far more interesting and intense, and I wish the author would have put more time and effort into that portion of the story. I’m not saying leave out the flashbacks all together, because they did serve a purpose I think? but put much less of them.

2. Mental illness. There is serious mental illness in this novel, which is why I included the review during Mental Illness Awareness Week. (Ok, so it was a coincidence that I finished reading it now, but let’s go with it, k?) Colleen is under serious pressure to get into Harvard and add .1 to her GPA to clinch valedictorian. I’ve been there, in school, in high pressure situations (mostly that I’ve put on myself), so I got where these students were coming from. The “Mystery Illness” and its effects on the students really clinched me and made me keep reading. I really, really wanted to know what was going on.

3. Colleen was… dull. For a smart girl in this novel, Colleen is clueless. She doesn’t know what’s going on in her friends’ lives, she doesn’t really care too much about the “Mystery Illness”, she doesn’t even care about her family all that much. Although I think that the author intended her lack of empathy to be a side-effect of her stress, it made for a really lame narrator. This novel would have benefitted from multiple POVs. (Yea, I just said that.)

With all the negativity, why did I give it a 3 star review? Well, I thought the way Colleen’s story played out was truly interesting, and I felt connected to the girls at this all girls’ school.